Here's a proposed submerged prototype for an orbit-capable gun:
Q&A: Dr John Hunter -- The man who wants to shoot the Moon
Posted on 05/24/2012 7:30:35 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
I thought the idea of shooting something into space was from Jules Verne's story of a trip to the moon.
Q&A: Dr John Hunter -- The man who wants to shoot the Moon
Verne's story put cigar-smoking humans on the Moon, shooting them out of a cannon in, hmm, I think, Florida (!). That really, really wouldn't have worked. The other needed line of research, that of making satellites sturdy enough to survive the boost to orbit, was more difficult than the ballistics technology. Bull worked on this project five years, was overtaken by the missile men, and never achieved orbit with one of his projectiles. Thirty or so years later, his altitude record was broken by a gas gun project of Lawrence Livermore.
From Earth To Moon Jules Verne:
http://manybooks.net/titles/vernejuletext93moon10.html
> In his 1903 publication on space travel, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky refuted Verne’s idea of using a cannon for space travel. He concluded that a gun would have to be impossibly long. The gun in the story would subject the payload to about 22,000 g of acceleration (see formula). However, he was nevertheless inspired by the story and developed the theory of spaceflight. Gerald Bull and the Project HARP proved after 1961 that a cannon can shoot a 180 kg (400 lb) projectile to an altitude of 180 kilometres (110 mi) and reach 32 percent of the needed escape velocity.[citation needed] Additionally, during the Plumbbob nuclear test series, a 900 kg (2,000 lb) capping plate made of steel was blasted away and never found. It has been speculated that the plate entered outer space because its speed was estimated to be between two and six times the escape velocity, but engineers believe it melted in the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon#Technical_feasibility_of_a_space_cannon
Was the gas gun project the one where they used propane injection in the barrel and a teardrop shaped projectile to achieve velocities of a few thousand ft/sec, from, IIRC old M-60 (tank) barrels welded together?
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